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Blue Prince (PC) by dkirschner (Dec 31st, 2025 at 09:41:06) |
I LOVED Blue Prince...until I didn't. Fasten your seatbelt because you're on the complain train. Wait, trains don't have seatbelts...do they?
Blue Prince has a great concept. I went in blind and quickly realized that I was not playing a regular puzzle game. I was playing a roguelite puzzle game with (mostly hidden) deckbuilding elements. Cool.
So let that be a spoiler warning of sorts. If you want to be completely surprised by how it works, then don't read this.
In Blue Prince, the first goal that you have is to reach "room 46" in a mansion. The mansion is laid out in a 9x5 grid of rooms (that's 45 rooms; the 46th is a mystery!). The gimmick is that the rooms reset every day. You have x number of steps you can take in a day before you have to "call it a day," resetting the mansion and starting from the beginning.
Imagine you are an architect. You begin your day in the entryway, which has doors facing west, north, and east (and south to outside). You choose a door and "draft" a room. What that means is that you are presented with three rooms from your deck (you can never see your deck, so you don't know exactly what's in there; I assume one copy of most rooms to start, though later on you get slightly more info about what is in your deck and are able to manipulate it a little bit). You can choose one of those three rooms to build. Rooms:
- have different configurations. Some are dead ends, some have 2 doors, or even 4.
- cost different resources. Some rooms cost gems, some require keys to open, some are electronically locked, etc.
- are of different types. Some are bedrooms, hallways, green rooms, red rooms, shops, etc.
- have different effects. For example, bedrooms tend to give you steps (e.g., +10 steps for drafting this room; +2 steps every time you enter; +5 steps every time you draft a bedroom), hallways tend to have lots of doors, red rooms tend to have even more doors but often come with negative effects (e.g., for the rest of the day one of your draft choices will be hidden [dangerous!]; lose 1 gold every time you enter; lose 1/2 of your steps).
- may have items (e.g., gold, gems, keys, or utility items like shovels [dig up dirt], a magnifying glass [scrutinize papers and pictures], or a metal detector [makes noise near metal and makes finding coins and keys more likely).
Those are the basics, then. You build the mansion each day as you walk through it, attempting to strategically map your way to the antechamber, a room opposite the entryway on the far side of the mansion, through whose locked doors room 46 may sit. I say "may" because I never actually got through the antechamber. I got inside it once, but there is another locked door to get out of it that I never figured out how to open. Your main hazards are running out of keys, gems, and steps, such that you will be confounded by a locked door (no key, womp womp), unable to draft what you need (some rooms cost gems and you might be forced to draft a dead end, for example, womp womp), or you tire out and have to call it a day. These were problems for me early on, but I ended up rarely running out of these resources. More often, later on, I would paint myself into a corner, come up against electronically locked doors when I didn't have a keycard or hadn't shut off the power, or, most commonly, I would just not get any useful combination of rooms/items and couldn't solve whatever puzzles I needed to solve, or just couldn't make it into the antechamber.
Those latter problems are what kill this game for me. I really, really, really want to keep loving it, but unfortunately it gets really tedious because, however much strategy you employ, you need a lot of luck on your side. I stopped on day 21 and had played about 16 hours. It was day 14ish, and around 11-12 hours, that I started to get the "uh oh" feeling that I wasn't going to finish, chin resting in my hand as yet another day was ended through no fault of my own. I stopped seeing much new (though ironically on my last "just one more day" run, I saw a bunch of new rooms, solved two new puzzles, discovered a big new puzzle, and felt slightly compelled to continue). Here's the thing. You will figure out what you need to do, but you will be unable to do it unless you are able to find the correct items and draft the correct rooms, often in a correct order (and avoid all the pitfalls I mentioned above, like running out of keys). For example, I know that to get into the antechamber, I need to find one of several rooms with levers that open doors to the antechamber. One lever is found after solving a puzzle in the secret garden, a room that I drafted one time by dumb luck. It requires that you use the secret garden key, which I have also seen exactly one time in 21 days, in a specific area of the mansion to draft the room. This means, by the way, not only that you have to find the secret garden key (again, I am 1 for 21 with that), but that you have to find it before drafting rooms in the specific spots in which you CAN draft the secret garden and/or that you haven’t already blocked off those spaces. Another lever is behind a locked door in the great hall (a room with 7 locked doors). I have double the success rate of this, having found that lever 2 times in 21 days. Again, you first need to get lucky and draft the great hall (I saw it maybe 4 or 5 times), but then, because the great hall has 7 locked doors, you then also need to have tons of keys or the lockpick kit (which lets you sometimes pick locks in normal doors). So, there are three times that I found levers to open a way into the antechamber. The very first time I opened an antechamber door, I made it in, but not the other two, because even if you do open the antechamber door, you need to draft rooms leading to that side of the antechamber in such a way that you can actually get inside. It very well may be that you get to the space next to the antechamber door that you have opened, and then your three options to draft don’t include a room with a door on the correct side. Day over and an hour of your life gone.
Here are some other examples of not getting what you need or things taking a long time:
- I found the chess puzzle after 20 days. I assume that solving this requires finding a bunch of chess pieces scattered throughout the mansion, which will take who knows how long. On my last two days, I found three unique chess pieces. I have no idea how long finding the rest will take. I will basically have to draft every single room until I find all the pieces, and they could be hidden in super rare rooms! I said I found like 4 new rooms in my last (21st) run. These are rooms I'd never seen before. If you need those rooms for something, good luck!
- Apparently there is an item, a wrench, that is super useful. Never seen it. Not in the toolshed, not in any item closets, not in a shop, not for trade, never. I am sure there are other items I also never saw.
- One very useful item is the shovel, which lets you dig up things when you see dirt mounds (common in green rooms and underground areas). If you draft a particular room outside in the west wing, it increases the number of dirt mounds found throughout the estate that day. I was never able to draft that room and get the shovel in the same run.
- Another shovel one…if you draft a laboratory, you can set up “experiments”, which are cause-and-effect actions like “every time you eat an apple, gain 5 additional steps” or whatever. You are given three causes and three effects to mix and match. One of the causes is “dig up junk” and one of the effects is “permanently increase your allowance (starting gold) by 1.” Permanently increasing your allowance is awesome. Anyway, I found “dig up junk” twice and of course never got a shovel. One of those times I had more dirt piles too! And I found “permanently increase your allowance” twice and was never able to do the cause that resulted in the benefit. You just have to get lucky.
- There is a room, the boiler room, from which you can send steam power to other rooms. Some rooms have piping for steam, but most don’t. There are like 5 rooms that are affected by the boiler room, that can be powered. The catch is, you have to actually draft them in such a way that you pipe the steam physically through them. I NEVER was able to pipe steam anywhere. I would route the steam, draft rooms from the boiler room, and get a bunch of bedrooms or something that don’t need power or don’t even have piping to chance drafting something useful after that. Solving the various boiler room power puzzles would require getting multiple specific drafts in a row. That is crazy.
- And so on and so forth x 100.
It’s not just the randomness that is bothering me, but the over-reliance on it. Yes, there is some strategizing. For example, you can boost your chances of getting a shovel by drafting a room that lets you request items that will appear the next day, gunning for rooms with items like closets, or building a commissary and hoping there is one for sale. And there are permanent upgrades for meta-progression that are helpful. For example, I was up to starting each day with 2 gems, 11 coins, and 20 extra steps. You can also permanently upgrade some rooms, manipulating water in the pump room persists, etc. But you just cannot get around drafting the “wrong” rooms, not getting items you need when you need them, etc. If you aren’t getting what you need, there isn’t really anything you can do. I mean, it’s not engaging. Like, you just draft rooms until you decide to call it a day. It’s slow, and it gets repetitive. The meta puzzles are cool as hell, but the per-day puzzles are a slog, figuring out the box riddles or (and this is actually a puzzle) solving increasingly complicated arithmetic problems on the dartboard. If I have demonstrated that I can solve arithmetic puzzles 10 times, can you please not make me do it anymore?!
In most roguelites, there is combat that keeps you engaged, even if you fail a run. I’m not faulting Blue Prince for no combat, but it is missing something to keep you engaged for run after run after run when you are not finding anything new or advancing any of the puzzles. Too slow, too repetitive, too reliant on luck. I still like it…it’s something different…but I’m not going to finish it. It could take me just a few more hours to get lucky and for things to click, or I could see this taking 40 hours, and I have no idea which it will be!
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Chaosbane (PS4) by jp (Dec 30th, 2025 at 11:54:55) |
When we first played, we played with the "basic" (not updated/patched) version - because the patch was downloading and we wanted to start playing straight away. That might have been a mistake...
When we booted it up again to continue playing (we really wanted to finish Chapter 4, and felt like we were almost there...) - we got a message that the "God skills" had been reset or something and that we should re-spec them. Not a problem because we hadn't unlocked any yet (there's three tiers of skills you can unlock, with the God skills very exciting-at least in name!)...
...but my son's character was Level 1 (instead of 18 or so). Well, that sucked! We played a bit with him running away in the background while I tanked and he quickly hit level 2. As an experiment we then closed the game, and booted it up again to see if the character levelling disappeared again. It did not, so we assume the patching process screwed that up.
So, what to do?
We did finish the chapter - and it was a bit more fun to be fair. Well, for me at least! This is because the game was a bit on the easy-side, and now it was more challenging since it was scaled for two characters (I think), but only one was viable. The final boss fight was particularly exciting as I had to dance around, carefully fire of shots, and be very careful about crowd control - using the potion carefully, since the cooldown was also something I had to watch out for.
I had thought about playing solo a bit on his account to level up the character a bit - but really, I want to know if he wants to play more or if we should try another co-op game.
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Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PS4) by jp (Dec 29th, 2025 at 12:20:44) |
Color me surprised!
I probably would have known this had I played the game soon after it came out (which I could not because I bought it a lot later when it was really cheap). But, this game has really surprised me by adding two things unexpectedly to (what I thought was going to be) the "usual" JRPG format...
a. There's sort-of-RTS-battle system! You control 2 (at first, but then you get more people to join, but it's capped at 4) "squads" of soldiers in a battle - there are different types of squads (there's a rock-paper-scissors thing that's color coded red/green/blue) with the yellow squads ranged units. It's weird because your character - young Kind Evan - stands in the middle (chibi!) with the 2 (then 4) squads arranged around him. It's sort of like he stands in the center of a compass, and the squads (I forget how many soldiers they have) are clumped in a circle on the W and E compass sports (and later all 4 cardinal directions, N/S/W/E). Everyone moves as a single unit but you can rotate the squads clock- and counter-clockwise, again, Evan always in the center and acting as the axis of rotation. So, when you move forward you can rotate the squads so, say, the red one is in front and will thus run into the opponent of the (worse-of) color first. And then fighting happens and the units that are killed fly off and disappear. You really have to pay attention to the color matching, squads gain experience and level up (different battles are tougher enemies), and terrain also plays a role. Additionally you have a set number of points that you can spend during battle to do special attacks/effects or re-supply your squads. Timing also matters, you rarely want to rush forward to attack, and I've found that probing and retreating (goading the enemy into rushing forward) can be effective. It's a fun system, and the battles aren't easy! (you often face waves of enemies over the battlefield space - so, enemy has more than 4 squads and they all move separately from each other).
b. Base building!
King Evan decides to start a new kingdom...and so you do (like there was a large swatch of empty unclaimed land? Sure, let's go with it)... At this point it's just a city (well, village) - so more like a City-State than a kingdom? (in size). You build buildings, assign people to work in them, do research to improve your stuff - like better spells - and more. You then have to do sidequests to find people to recruit to your kingdom! (so you can put them to work in the right places). I'm currently stuck unable to level up my Kingdom to level two because I don't have enough citizens (you need 25 I think)... It's also a neat little system, and it's kind of fun to have to wander around meeting NPCs and talking to the ones who are recruitable (indicated by a different color in the map).
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Chaosbane (PS4) by jp (Dec 29th, 2025 at 11:58:01) |
I only picked this up because it seemed like fun AND it 4-player couch co-op. So, a nice diversion of a game I could play with my kids.
The game's essentially a Diablo-style action RPG - very much in the Diablo-style, but set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe - I think it predates Age of Sigmar? - to be honest, I don't think it matters much...
I haven't really gone deep in Diablo IV, but I found this game's deviations from the Diablo III design interesting...
1. There's no real tutorial. We sort of started playing, but had to figure out a bunch of stuff (easy stuff) by experimenting and paying attention. Like, how the different powers work, how to configure them, what the different numbers mean, etc.
2. You always have a healing potion, but it's on a cool down - so you can't spam 'em.
3. There's no item shop (I finished Chapter 1, so maybe there will be? There's 4 chapters to the game). There was a place where donate all your extra loot/gear and get rewards from it. There's also no items other than stuff you can equip. So no messing around with ammo, or herbs, or food, or materials or whatever. I like the simplicity here.
4. When you pick up loot, anything that's not for your character automatically goes to the right character. So, no worries about loot hogging.
5. We've been collecting gold. But have no idea what to spend it on. We both died once - and paid money to resurrect, but that's it.
6. There are these "fragments" (in four colors). Been collecting those and we have no idea what they're for.
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Leon's Mahjong (iPd) by berliner (Dec 26th, 2025 at 04:17:38) |
Today I've finished all the new mini boards add on. They are quite fast to finish.
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